Like Some Strange Shadow
by Cherry
Summary: Ray's getting there.


html> _ Ray's got nothing to prove._

_Thanks are due to the wonderful BrooklineGirl for beta._

_Note: This was originally started for the (neck)ing challenge at dsflashfiction. It spiraled out of control and was eaten by my computer several times, so it's several times that word limit and I missed the deadline, but there are bonus points for anyone who catches the reference._

_F/K, 14A _

* * *

Like Some Strange Shadow

* * *

Like a blow to the head it hits him, every time. Smiling pictures on the wall, pet bowls, tacky souvenirs, and dates circled on the calendar and – Bam! – body on the floor and blood on someone's hands; and the world tilts on its axis, skews just a little, some half-degree away from normal.

The guy is lying sprawled across a tastefully appointed oriental rug, one shoe half off and laces trailing. He's got a confused look on his face and a smile carved into his throat. Forensics has been through already, photographing and putting down numbers, turning this family's life into something easy for the data entry guys to catalogue and punch into a database.

Ray's looking around, at this place that used to be a home and is now a crypt. His boots are unnaturally loud on the floor so he tries not to move. Doesn't work much because he has to, you know, investigate the surroundings.

(And even if not, Ray's always had a hard time sitting, standing, staying still because as soon as it gets quiet he starts to hear rhythms in everything around him and with lack of motion his skin starts to chafe. If he was a kid today, sitting in the back of Mrs. Paulson's third grade classroom, tapping his pencil and jiggling his knee and throwing balled up pieces of paper at Ami Roald's neatly-braided hair, they'd probably diagnose him with ADD.)

So Ray's trying to muffle his steps as he pokes this way and that, opens this drawer and that one, finds paper clips and post-it notes and old movie tickets, but nothing to tell him why someone would want to murder a father of three while his little girl watched from the closet.

He wishes Dief was here, making Dief-noises to fill the silence. Dief's downstairs with the girl; and Ray, Ray's here with Fraser in this crypt. He can hear his breath and Fraser's, and he can hear Fraser doing – something – with the corpse that he really doesn't want to think about, so he stares at the refrigerator door. There's a to-do list stuck to it with brightly coloured alphabet magnets, and he punches the wall.

"Ray?" Fraser asks, all polite concern and not the least bit freaking out.

"I'm okay," Ray says. Curls his fingers into a fist because he's really not, but. He wanders back into the living room and Fraser's giving him that look that means 'Violence has never solved anything,' or 'Ray, if you'd prefer for me to handle this, please say so,' or 'Really, Ray, that was unprofessional of you, and as you interrupted me in the middle of licking the seven most likely points for his assailant to have made contact with his body, I'm going to have to begin again.'

Ray doesn't have an answer for any of this, and lying to Fraser has always made him feel like a bit of a shit, so he just doesn't meet his eyes. Instead, Ray picks up a photograph from the coffee table and wants to scrub the blood from the glass. Doesn't because it wouldn't work, just smudge the blood around and stain the cuff of his shirt. Doesn't do it because the splatter pattern might tell them - hell, Ray's not sure what, but it might tell them something.

"I'm going to go talk to the girl," Ray says, staring single-mindedly at the photograph.

There's a blanket folded over the back of the couch. Light green and baby blue, faded and incongruous. It's worn smooth and he thinks that if he touched it, it would be softer than the leather couch it's draped over. It's obviously someone's favourite, and Ray grabs it on his way out the door, walks like he can't feel Fraser's eyes burning into his back.

The girl is seven, eight, and sitting on the back of the ambulance. There's a scratchy wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders and Ray drapes the green and blue one around her as well.

She's got tears stuck to her eyelashes but they haven't spilled over yet, and Dief's curled up protectively against her side. "Hey," Ray says, and "Shhh," and puts a careful arm around her. Without a thought, she turns her head to his shoulder. Looking down at her, all loose blonde curls and elbows wrapped up in his arms, he feels that phantom pain and wonders if he'd be able to do this if he had a little girl at home with Stella's eyes.

It wasn't in the cards, though, so he's down here thinking about the things it might be better he's never had and Fraser's inside talking to the dead. He thinks this ought to say something about them, but it's just -

Like a blow to the head every time.

Dief whines and licks her face and the girl finally starts to cry. There's another girl, red hair and freckles, sitting on the neighbour's step with her hands between her knees and watching them.

Brain damage is cumulative, Ray knows; but he says all the things that people always say and doesn't let go.

* * *

"I don't think I can do this anymore," Ray says. He's sitting at the bar and staring down at his hands, clasped loosely about his beer. He can see Fraser's ridiculous red reflection in the bar top.

So they closed the case – perp was the ex-husband of the wife, presumed dead after a poaching trip to South Africa – and Ray knows without a doubt that their house is going to be on sale by the end of the year, because that house will not be a home to them again. Ever.

Ray is a good undercover operative. He has always found it easy to step outside of himself and into someone else.

He wonders, sometimes (usually after a few beers, when he's sitting alone in his apartment with the TV flickering in the background and case files on his coffee table) what this says about him, that he's always been so eager - more and more eager as the years went by - to get away from whoever he is.

Two weeks under cover in '89, five in '91, two months in '92, and now this unknown term. A portrait of a marriage in decline.

This one is the worst, somehow, because – nice thing about undercover is that the head the blows are landing on isn't his. Isn't usually, but this time he's more himself than someone else, and the hits are coming hard and fast and –

Every one of them seems to be connecting. He feels like one of those toys that kids get to play with, the punching bags with water in the bottom, and he just keeps popping up for each whack because something in side of him hauls him up when it would be smarter to just stay down.

This one is the worst, because he's still Kowalski, but he's Kowalski-as-Vecchio. Guy who no one would miss as a placeholder for a guy who someone would.

"I don't know how much longer I can do this," Ray says, and his fists tighten around the bottle. There's another Mountie (old guy, and what, is the city being infested?) sitting at a booth off to the side with a red-haired girl. "I just –"

He's waiting for Fraser to say 'Whatever do you mean, Ray?' or 'That's preposterous, Ray,' or 'Surely you're being melodramatic, Ray,' but Fraser's not saying anything at all.

* * *

A commonly-held belief about Ray is that he was twelve when the first seeds of law enforcement were planted in his blood. That helping stop that bank robbery was what set him down this path.

This is not true. What he learned that day was that he loved Stella, that wet pants are uncomfortable, and that he never, ever wanted to be a banker.

Becoming a cop was nothing that simple.

* * *

Ray has always had trouble with words. They tangle and trip on his tongue until what left his mind as orderly arrangements of letters comes out like so much junk. He feels like that kid from the Poltergeist sometimes, but with alphabet soup instead of pea.

So when, four weeks into his first term at college, he pulled his English paper from the pile and there was a big 'A-' circled in the top corner, it took him a minute or two to adjust. "Huhhh..." he said, and blinked.

"Nice, Shakespeare," a girl said. "But can the rest of us get ours?"

And he shook his head and realized he was holding up the line. He dropped into a seat and checked once again to make sure it was really his name in the corner and he hadn't stolen a paper belonging to 'S.R. Kowaltsi' or anything.

The paper was unceremoniously removed from his hands, and the girl was sitting beside him, flipping through it. Her paper was on her desk and had a red 'C' on it.

"I'm not actually good with words," he said, feeling kind of guilty and more than a little embarrassed.

"Really?" she asked, eyebrow raised and not looking at him. Flipping pages. Of his report.

Guilt faded to annoyance. "Yeah," he said. "That was just. You know. Just a whatsis."

"A fluke?" she asked.

And that was Lydia.

* * *

Fraser's cabin is small and quiet, and the only source of colour on the horizon. Ray sat up on the roof one day and looked around as far as he could see, and all he could see was snow, more snow, and sky.

(Town is actually only about twenty minutes away by dogsled, less by skidoo, but there's a rise to the east that blocks it out.)

Ray is still trying to decide whether or not he likes Canada.

On one hand it's got lots of snow, open spaces, Fraser, and really good beer.

On the other hand, it's got a shitload of snow, huge expanses of land with nothing on them, and Fraser.

The thing about Canada, Ray decides, is that it's not permanent. It's like, purgatory. Or something.

They got back from their adventure, minus several pounds and plus a fair amount of facial hair, and Ray just – stayed.

Fraser hasn't said anything, but he keeps getting stranger and more formal, and he's gone most of the time. There's this look on his face, every time he gets back from a week-long patrol or from chasing poachers, and sees that Ray's still there. It's surprise and some tiny bit of pleasure mixed with what Ray thinks of as Fraser's 'Oh. Well.' face. (It could be confusion, but Fraser doesn't get confused about much, so Ray's pretty sure it's the good old 'Oh. Well.' that's always followed by awkward silences.)

In Chicago, Ray always had a problem with silence. Silence was what you got after your parents had another screaming match and realized you could hear. It was the easy thing that filled in the spaces between you and Stella at the breakfast table that got thicker and thicker with every passing year. It was what you got after a gunshot or at a funeral, and always in the background was the sound of traffic and other people's radios and someone else's screaming kid.

Here, it's not like silence at all, but like everything unimportant has been stripped away. There's just him, the whistle of the kettle, and the whisper of the wind at the door. He likes to sit and listen to the crackle of the flames at night while the snow taps at the door.

And he writes. He bought a few journals first time they were in Yellowknife, before they set off on their adventure, remembering his English prof's hand on his shoulder when he told her he was taking some time off. Then he felt like an idiot and shoved them into the back of his trunk. He didn't look at them for two months.

When the silence fell, out here, the sudden ringing echo of voices in his head nearly deafened him. It's taken him a while; to work out which belonged to him and which belonged to the people he was when he was undercover and never quite unbecame. Stella's in there, and his parents, and there's a voice which sounds distinctly Canadian. (This surprises him more than the rest, though he probably should have expected it.)

So he sits up on the roof, on this tiny patch of shingles in the middle of this great white expanse, and he smokes and watches the sky. Sometimes, there's a girl with red hair and freckles sitting beside him, and this is one thing about Canada he hates: it makes it awful hard to ignore the ghosts.

So it's taking a while, but Ray's getting there.

* * *

He and Stella were off again when he started college – she came and helped him pack, and he carried her boxes to her dorm room at university, but they weren't actually seeing each other.

They talked to each other at least once a week on the phone. She was playing the field and he was seeing an art student named Adam.

"What happened to Cindy?" Stella asked when he told her. It hurt, talking to her, sometimes (and sometimes he heard the pain in her voice as well), but the pain of knowing and laughing was better than the pain of just... not.

"Nice legs, but she agreed with everything I said," Ray told her, sprawled across his bed with the receiver pinned to his shoulder. "Not as nice as yours, though," he added after a second of thought. Lydia, who had wandered into the room, threw a pillow at his head.

Stella laughed and he felt a huge weight lift from his chest. "Love you, babe," he said, and Adam, who had wandered into the room as well, sat on his stomach. "Nrrrgh," Ray said; then holding the receiver away from his head, "I'm locking the door from now on."

"You keep saying things like that, and you're going to make use think that you don't love us," Lydia said, and Stella must have heard because she laughed.

"Love you too, Ray, but I've got a date picking me up any minute now, and I don't want to answer the door like this."

Pause.

"Just out of curiosity, what are you wearing right now?" he asked, and Adam punched him in the ribs.

"Oh, Ray, what makes you think I'm wearing anything at all?" Stella asked, and hung up the phone.

(He would later come to wonder how it had ended the way it did, with such bitterness and anger, when they had parted amicably so many times before.)

* * *

Town is about two hundred thirty homes, four to five hundred people depending on the season. It's got a grocer/supply outfit that brings in the Sears catalogue, the two-room RCMP detachment, a bar with a pool table and a dartboard, a restaurant that's open odd hours, and an engine place.

He and Fraser have been drifting farther and farther apart, and Ray feels the separation growing greater every time they see each other.

Guy named Henry Littlestar runs the shop. Ray'd just about written himself out, and started dropping by and offering advice until one day Henry just threw a pair of coveralls at him. They don't pay him much, but Ray finds there's not much he needs up here. One thing he'll say for Canada: it's great for stripping away the things you thought were important. He quit smoking at some point without even realizing it.

Henry gets this strange look in his eye when Ray mentions he doesn't know much about trapping or hunting, and from then on, Henry takes him to check the lines when he goes out with his son and daughter.

(When they were looking for the outreaching hand, they'd discovered that while Fraser was good with the dogs – and he was, Fraser was good at **everything** – Ray was **gifted,** and so Ray would take care of the dogs, set camp, and start the fire while Fraser was out, Ray explains. – 'I never doubted that you pull your own weight,' Henry said, and Ray knew that whatever that look was, it wasn't about him.)

Fraser's been home from patrol for about two weeks when he comes back with the letter. It's the longest he's stayed in town since, well, ever. Ray knows that Fraser and Henry had words the night Fraser got back, but it, like the weekly flights running out of Yellowknife, is one of the things they don't talk about.

(Ray knows he's overstayed his welcome, but he just doesn't have any place else to be. He can't go back to being Vecchio – Vecchio's got that covered – and Ray's pretty sure that the Kowalski he left behind isn't the guy he is any more, either.)

Ray's skinning a rabbit when Fraser hops off the skidoo. "Ray. Er," he says, and stops. "Would you care to come inside for a spell?" Fraser asks, all excruciating politeness, and Ray wants to yell, or hit him, or something.

Instead he clomps to the door and sticks his boots on the mat. Starts running the water in the sink and washes the blood from his hands and thinks: weather's getting nicer every day.

"We received a letter today," Fraser says. Ray wants to ask 'who, why,' but the envelope that Fraser's set on the counter has Stella's writing on it: "Raymond Kowalski and Benton Fraser" in her neat little script, and it's already been opened.

"What'd she say?" Ray asks, carefully scrubbing his nails. His hands are always stained these days, with ink and grease and blood. He's got two journals full at this point. Fraser is still neatly manicured and soft-skinned, and Ray doesn't ever wonder what those hands would feel like on his.

"I would have waited, of course," Fraser says. "But it was addressed to both of us, and -"

"Frase, buddy, it's okay," Ray says as he dries his hands. "Just. What'd she say?"

And he knows, with the way Fraser won't quite meet his eye. "Perhaps," Fraser says, "you ought to -"

"Yeah, fine, whatever," Ray says, snags the letter and drops down at the table. He has to read it twice.

Fraser's looking at him, concern with a side of polite-but-remote Mountie, and Ray puts the invitation down the table with a little more force than necessary. "Well," he says. "Looks like we're going to need the monkey suits."

Fraser declines to attend, so it's Henry and his wife Suzanne who drive Ray to Yellowknife.

(They argued over that, Fraser's not going, but Fraser claimed duty and Ray called bullshit; Ray played the 'skipping your best friend's wedding card' and Fraser got this funny look in his eyes; Fraser questioned his motivations in going and Ray questioned his motivations in staying. Dief covered his eyes and Fraser accused Ray of only going to try to stop the wedding and Ray broke a plate and stomped out of the house. What Fraser didn't get was this: he's spent most of his life loving Stella, and that is not something that's going to go away. It took him a little longer than her to catch on to the fact that it changed, but they're always going to love each other.)

Suzanne thinks he's handling this well, but the thing is? Ray knew it was coming.

A month ago, when he was in Yellowknife with Henry, he called Stella from the bar. She sounded - happy - like she hadn't in years, and he heard Vecchio's voice in the background, yelling at the television.

"Ray -" she said, and "This isn't how I wanted you to -" and finally "How's Canada?"

But he smiles so she can hear it and says "Doe he have any idea what he's getting into?" and "Does he argue with you when you need it?" and "My legs are still nicer."

It shouldn't have been like it was, and it shouldn't have to be like this, but these are the cards they've been dealt and he thinks he's finally strong enough to want for her what she wants for herself.

After he hung up, he got roaring drunk and told everyone stories about the most beautiful Gold Coast girl in the entire world, but all things considered he thinks he handled it fairly well.

* * *

So, Ray and Stella were off again during university, but everyone knew they loved each other, up to and including the people they were currently dating.

"You're a disgrace," Lydia used to tell him. "You want to take a look at my paper?"

(It was odd to him, still, that the words didn't twist on the paper the way they did on his tongue, and he signed up for the list of English classes Lydia and Adam left on his dresser with a shrug, because even if he'd of been able to think of a reason not to, they would have argued it out of him.)

Maybe that's why he was going to Lydia's dorm room that night. Maybe they were studying, maybe she'd found a way to get some beer, maybe they were going to sit around and eat popcorn and watch movies with Steve McQueen.

He and Adam were walking down the hall and Ray remembers: the carpet on the floor was orange shag, and the light in the hall was out. The door was half-open and she had a maroon scarf draped over the lamp, so the room was lit with red. He and Adam were laughing, and the chair that Ray'd helped Lydia carry back from the flea market was lying on the ground.

It was quiet, then, when they stopped laughing, and Ray remembers thinking how unusual that was, that there was no music or laughter from the nearby rooms, just the rhythmic swing and creak of the rope. Then he was yelling for help and doors were slamming and he had Lydia by the legs, lifting her up and holding her and screaming at Adam to cut her the fuck down.

She was wearing a skirt so her legs were bare, and he had to have known even then that they were too late because her skin was cool, but she was falling into his arms and he was pounding on her chest and yelling at her to wake up.

"She's gone, Ray, she's gone," Adam was telling him, and holding his shoulders. "She's gone."

Ray sat there, with one hand on her neck and the other on her cheek and Adam rubbing his back, until the police got there and ushered them away.

He doesn't know who called Stella - Adam probably, or his roommate, but he was sitting on the lawn in the dew and the dark, staring at the stars and all of a sudden he had an armful of Stella.

And he sat there and held her tight while she said all the things that people always say, buried his face in her hair and wondered why his cheeks were so wet.

* * *

Stella comes to the airport to pick him up. He wasn't expecting - he's not actually sure what he was expecting, but it wasn't this. They could have sent ... okay, maybe Stella was the most logical choice. "I coulda taken a taxi, you know," he says as he slings an arm around her shoulder.

"I know," she says. She's glowing, just a bit, and he thinks it was a long time ago the last time she glowed like that for him.

"You look good," he says, and smiles. It's a brittle smile, his face pulling in ways that makes him aware it's been much too long since these muscles were used.

She looks at him, with engine grease worked into the cracks in his skin, his clothes hanging loose on his frame and the places he thinks his face is going to fracture from smiling, and she hugs him. "I'm glad to see you," she says against his chest, then releases him quickly and walks to the car.

They don't speak the entire way to his apartment.

He's been gone for almost six months, so there's dust on everything and he's afraid to open the fridge. There are four messages on his machine, all wrong numbers. He thinks of looking someone up, of going out, but the only people he can think of are from the station house, and he's just not ready to deal with that yet.

He sits on his couch and eats pizza, makes arrangements, and watches TV. (He finds he didn't miss TV, not really. He'd somehow managed to forget that it was all, well, crap.) He cleans his fridge, packs things into boxes, goes out and buys beer. He doesn't think about Fraser at all.

Stella shows up at this door the night before the wedding, Chinese takeout clasped to her chest. "Hey," she says, and "Do you mind if I -" and "I brought food -"

He stands there, at the door, and blinks. "Yeah, come in," he tells her, and takes the packages. It's like they're twelve years old again, all gangly limbs and awkwardly dancing around each other. He's sitting on the table and she's sitting on the counter, both of them concentrating pretty fiercely on the chopsticks when he sets his food down beside him loudly. She stops eating and looks at him. Just - looks.

"How did we let it get like this?" he asks, looking at the boxes around him and the space between them. Stella looks like she's not sure if she wants to laugh or cry. He laughs, because it's easier. Laughs, and laughs, and doesn't even realize how close he's skating to the edge until Stella's standing in front of him with his head in her hands.

"I'm sorry," he says with a hiccupping laugh, wrapping his hands around hers. "I'm sorry that you were the one who saw the writing on the wall." He'd like to blame it on the voices he's just cleared from his head, on his job or hers, but it was just him and Stella, and -

"Sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, it just doesn't work," she tells him, and doesn't look at all like she's laughing.

"You should be gloating, you know," Ray says.

"Probably," she says. Kisses his palm and releases his hands. "But that would make me a real bitch. I'll wait for the gloating until I get back from my honeymoon."

It hurts, that this doesn't hurt more.

"Where are you going, anyway?" he asks and picks up his food again. Stella settles next to him on the table with hers.

"Bali," she says, picking an almond out and popping it in her mouth. "Two weeks on the beach."

"Nice."

"I thought so. Much nicer than a tour of the Arctic Circle."

Ray pushes his noodles around with his chopsticks. "Fraser and I. We're not. I mean -"

"Oh," she says, and looks thoughtful. "Really?" Pauses. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure, Stell. It's not exactly the sort of thing you miss."

"We all assumed, when you stayed in Canada."

He thinks about how Stella's always treated Fraser, and he wonders, he wonders how long she's assumed. "I was just -" words have always failed him, and she knows this. He thinks -

- Each crime scene is a blow, and I don't know how many bodies I have left before the brain damage becomes permanent.

- It might be too late, because sometimes I see Lydia (You remember Lydia, don't you?) and she's as real to me as that ring on your finger.

- Fraser and I live in the same place but we hardly even talk any more, and I can't help but think of you and me at the end, except Fraser and I never got that far, never even started. As far as I can tell, Fraser isn't anything that even looks like interested and I haven't been willing to risk ruining a friendship over it.

And he thinks:

I don't know how much of our friendship there is left to break.

"I'm tired, Stella," he says. "I'm just so damn tired."

Some of it must show in his eyes, because she holds him tightly for a long time.

The wedding is beautiful, and afterwards he kisses Stella and tells Vecchio that if he hurts her, he's going to break his nose.

* * *

"Are you trying to break your poor mother's heart?" his father roared when Ray told him he was applying to the academy. "After we worked so hard for you to go to school and rise above this, you throw it in our faces?"

Ray wanted to tell him about Lydia's smile and red hair and freckles, that she knit scarves and donated them to charity. He wanted to tell them about how he sat up all night with her when she broke up with her boyfriend, eating jelly beans and wishing there was something he could do when she started at the shadows; that her favourite colour was yellow and her skin burned quickly in the sun.

(Poor girl, everyone whispered. Her boyfriend broke up with her during finals, and she just didn't know what to do. Have you seen the boy? He's heartbroken.)

He wanted to tell his parents that her boyfriend was the son of a local newspaper baron, and she was an average girl with average grades from an average family and that the police called it suicide.

He wanted to tell them these things, that the police smiled at him and nodded and her boyfriend got to stand at the front of the funeral service. He wanted to, but he was never good with getting the words out, so Ray swore in English and his father swore in Polish and his mother sat in the kitchen with her head on the red-checked tablecloth and cried.

* * *

Ray's got a lot of time to think on his way back to Yellowknife. Flying in a plane actually isn't so bad once you've flown strapped to the outside of one, and his discman blocks out everything around him but the kids crying. And it doesn't, really, matter much that it doesn't – he's always kinda found the racket comforting.

So he sits there, tapping his fingers with the Rolling Stones and the Headstones, thinking about the choices he's made and the choices he's avoided making while a ghost sits in the next seat stares out the window.

He thinks about Henry and Suzanne Littlestar, and that he'd really like to watch their kids grow up. Thinks about old Mrs. Dupuis, who lost her husband last fall and how this next winter is supposed to be a cold one, thinks about how her arthritis is acting up and she could probably really use someone to chop and carry wood for her. Thinks about how the local pickup hockey game is always down one man, and the fact that he really didn't miss TV that much at all.

He doesn't have to think about Fraser, because he already knows where he stands on that one.

This – this isn't about not knowing when to let go.

(Or it its, but it's not about letting go of – It's not about letting go of people, not this time.)

He decides he likes Canada.

There are thunderstorms above Alberta, and he feels the brush of lips against his cheek. He thinks he sees the clouds below light up just a little brighter, and he doesn't have to look beside him to know that Lydia's gone.

He hopes she finds peace, wherever she is.

* * *

"So, here's the thing, Fraser," Ray says as he stomps in the door. "I'm staying." Dief tackles him, harder than usual, and Ray totters with his bags and falls to the floor. He hears Henry's truck pulling away, and tries to stop Dief from licking his face.

"A hand?" he hollers, trapped under his luggage and a wolf with bad breath. "Gah!" he exclaims, finally shoving Dief away from him. His stuff ends up in a pile and he's kind of ridiculously glad that there's nothing really breakable in any of it. "Thanks for the help, buddy," Ray grouses as he pulls himself upright and starts brushing off his clothes. Stops when he gets a good look at Fraser.

Fraser is sitting at the table with a cup of tea halfway to his mouth.

"Two things, actually. There are two things," Ray says as he sets his boots down by the door. He sits down across the table from Fraser, rocks his chair back onto two legs. Drops back down, gets up, and sits next to Fraser instead. "You want to know the second?"

Fraser's mouth snaps shut and he puts the teacup down on the table warily. "I apologize. What do you -"

"I'm staying, buddy," Ray says. "I can say it again, real slow, if you want."

"So you said." Fraser's eyebrows draw together. "But. Why?"

"I kind of like it here. Mrs. Finnigan makes good biscuits." Ray says. "The second thing is," Ray continues, staring at his hands, "I just can't do this any more."

Fraser's looking at Ray like he would when Fraser got back from patrol, only now Ray thinks it's just as much joy and confusion and wariness as it is super-Mountie. "I'm not sure what you –" Fraser starts. Stops. Takes a deep breath. "Mrs. Finnigan's –" is all he gets out.

Ray kisses him.

Easy and soft, but he takes the chance to tangle his fingers in the hair at the back of Fraser's neck. "Plus, I'd kind of miss the wolf," Ray says as he lets go. "Whether you want me or not, I'm staying."

He can't seem to make himself look Fraser in the eye. He doesn't want to know how badly he's fucked this up, but he'd rather regret the things he's done than the things he hasn't.

Fraser's just sitting there, starting at him blankly, and Ray curses under his breath and pushes away from the table. "Henry and Suzanne'll put me up for a while," he says, reaching for his boots. "Look, be as angry at me as you need to be," Ray says as he pulls them on. "Hit me if it'll make you feel better. Whatever." He looks up from his laces. "Hell, be pissed off that I thought you'd be angry. Just. Fraser, just feel something."

Fraser's still staring at him.

"I mean, I know you're all honest and decent and whatever," Ray says. "You've never – I see you, Frase, I mean, you didn't need anything in Chicago and you don't need anyone here, but - this is what's going to kill us, Fraser."

Fraser's standing uncomfortably and Ray's got one hand on the door. He wants – he wants to get it out this time, just get it out and get it over with. "It's just - We don't talk any more, hardly see each other, and I will be damned if we're going to end up not even friends, so you can –"

Fraser kisses him.

"Ray," Fraser says. And "Ray, Ray, Ray..."

Ray's against the door and he's very confused (Fraser must have gone super-Mountie again, because Ray didn't see him as much as move), but Fraser's got his forehead pressed against his and his hands on Ray's hips, and it's good.

"Henry asked me," Fraser whispers. "Whether I wanted you to need me or needed you to want to leave."

"And?" Ray asks, feeling the doorknob digging into his lower back.

"I didn't - I couldn't ask you to stay, Ray, not here. I couldn't ask you to stay and I couldn't make myself make you leave." Fraser's got his eyes closed, and he drops his head to Ray's shoulder. "I just - I couldn't ask you to stay here, Ray."

"That's -" Ray blinks. "That's really kind of stupid, Fraser."

And Fraser smiles into his shoulder. "I never said I didn't need someone around to point these things out to me."

Need.

Need.

Oh.

"Okay," Ray says. "Okay. I can do that."

* * *

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